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Category: Short Stories (Shen Congwen)

The old era reflected traditionalism, manifesting Daoism: a philosophy to breed mystical unification with nature. The new era represented rationalism, embracing Western Imperialism: that secularity is supreme and superior over spirituality.

The chronicle of the headsman Yang Jinbiao lay at the fall of the old, and at the dawn of the new, where bullets replaced blades as the primary components of battle.

Yang Jinbiao would butcher transgressors during Frost’s Descent, the season that typified cruelty, since greeneries were blighted by the iciness. Exceptionally, to Congwen, this might intimate exquisiteness, as the Republic chastised Yang Jinbiao for brandishing a sword instead of a projectile (on the scruples of modernization).

However, Zhuangzi, a tremendous influence to Congwen, disparaged the conception of regulating civilizations with standards of conduct. Within his naturalistic metaphysics, the Yin and Yang of righteousness and sinfulness is merely perceptual.

Let me correspond to Yang Jinbiao’s name, which connotes “Golden Banner”. A banner is an ensign at a rod, the emblem of combatants. The color gold, in Chinese aesthetics, is appraised as the most ravishing: it represents the earth element, lavishing emperors, abundant wealth, and is venerated in Buddhism.

To appoint an elderly decapitator to behead during the epoch of shotguns, to have the representation of earth to terminate lives during the season when earthly life itself becomes lifeless, furthermore in addition that the ex-headsman belonged to the West Gate (centering back to the history of customs, of the natural world) and subsequently the North Gate (centering forth to the infinitude of evolution, of the cosmic skies)…

Such palpable juxtapositions of Frost and Gold, Old and New, West and North, leaves an august Daoistic impression, which efficaciously deprecate the moral quandaries of the mechanized society without any remarks about political sciences.